Date:

Tue, 3 Mar

Location:

Rutherford, 4th flr.

Level:

Beginner

Prerequisites

None.

Tutorial: Understanding Latency & Application Responsiveness

Managing, monitoring, and improving application responsiveness is a common need for many software professionals. Whether you develop applications or manage them, understanding application responsiveness and the major mechanisms that affect it is key to achieving successful applications and happy users. In this workshop, Gil Tene (CTO, Azul Systems) will provide a an in-depth overview of Latency and Response Time Characterization, including proven methodologies for measuring, reporting, and investigating latencies, and and overview of some common pitfalls encountered (far too often) in the field.

WHAT WILL I LEARN

Our discussion will include an exploration of of the common needs and motivations for understanding the behaviour of application response time and latency, and ways to successfully capture these descriptions and relate them to business needs. However, even good characterization of bad data is useless. If measurements of response time present false or misleading latency information, even the best analysis can lead to wrong operational decisions and poor application experience. We will demonstrate and discusses some common pitfalls, false assumptions and problematic measurement techniques that lead to dramatically incorrect reporting results, and will explain how these false measurements naturally occur using the most common measurement methods and tools in use today. We will discuss the coordinated data omission problem, and ways to work around it, and will introduce and demonstrate how simple and recently open sourced tools can be used to improve and gain higher confidence in both latency measurement and reporting.

The workshop will include interactive walk throughs of commonly used load generation and latency measurement code to demonstrate some of specific issues discussed, and examine various ways to correct or avoid the issues in actual use.

While the material generally applies to all application environments, specific considerations in garbage collected environments (such as Java) will also be covered.

WHO SHOULD ATTEND

DevOps, software developers, architects, engineers and anyone with an interest understanding latency , response time, and how to both require and get better performance and behaviour from your applications

Speaker: Gil Tene

CTO and co-founder of Azul Systems

Gil Tene is CTO and co-founder of Azul Systems. He has been involved with virtual machine and runtime technologies for the past 25 years. His pet focus areas include system responsiveness and latency behavior. Gil is a frequent speaker at technology conferences worldwide, and an official JavaOne Rock Star. He pioneered the Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector (C4) that powers Azul's continuously reactive Java platforms. In past lives, he also designed and built operating systems, network switches, firewalls, and laser based mosquito interception systems.